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A close reading of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti and Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen in the context of 19th-century Europe. Discussion of the poetry will be enriched by selections from their essays on literature and art and by notes from the Zibaldone and Mon coeur mis à nu. Key themes and concepts include language, imagination, "noia," "spleen," and the oppositions between nature and civilization, modernity and antiquity. Taught in English.

Last offered: Spring 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

FRENCH 227:Paris: The Making of a Modern Icon (HISTORY 239E, URBANST 142)

Few places have been as heavily romanticized and mythologized as Paris. To many observers, Paris and its attractions serve as icons of modernity itself. By engaging with fiction, film, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, song, and other media, we¿ll trace how different people at different times have used Paris as both backdrop and main protagonist, and we'll consider how the city itself has incorporated and rebelled against such representations. The scope of our inquiry will stretch from the late 18th century to the present, covering a host of topics, figures, and sites: from the French Revolution to the protests of May '68, from Baudelaire to Hemingway, from the Impressionists to the Situationists. Taught in English

This course examines the ways writers in literature and medicine have used the narrative form to explore the ethics of care in what has been called the developing world. We will begin with a call made by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet for a literature of global health, namely fiction modeled on the social reform novels of the nineteenth century, understood to have helped readers develop a conscience for public health as the field emerged as a modern medical specialty. We will then spend the quarter understanding how colonial, postcolonial, and world literatures have answered and complicated this call. Readings will include prose fiction by Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Amitav Ghosh, Susan Sontag as well as physician memoirs featuring Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Verghese, Paul Farmer. And each literary reading will be paired with medical, philosophical, and policy writings that deeply inform the field of global health.

A comparative seminar on medieval love books and their reception. We will examine and question the notion of "amour courtois," which arose in the lyrics and romances of medieval France and was codified in Romantic-era criticism. Primary readings will be enriched by thinking about this notion through the lens of modern theories of desire, such as those of Girard, Lacan, and Zizek. Conducted in English with readings in translation.

FRENCH 245:French Political Thought From Rousseau to the Present (POLISCI 336C)

An overview of the current awakening of French political thought as it is grounded in a new reading of the great classics of French social thought, from Rousseau to Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. Readings of Lefort, Castoriadis, Louis Dumont, Ricoeur, Furet, Manent, Ferry, Renaut, Gauchet, Raynaud, etc. Readings in French. (Translations in English will be made available whenever possible.) Discussions in French and in English.

FRENCH 251:Writing, Memory, and Self-Fashioning (ITALIAN 251)

Writing is not a mere recording of the past, but a selection and reinvention of our experiences. We will look at how writing is central to the philosophical project of fashioning the self, even as it reveals that much of what we call the self is a fictional construct. Materials include fiction and memoirs (Primo Levi, Michel Tournier, Melania Mazzucco, Jonathan Littell), and theoretical works in philosophy (Bergson, James, Freud, Jung, Derrida, Wyschogrod, Nehamas), psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. Taught in English.

Last offered: Spring 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

FRENCH 258:The Great War: WWI in Literature, Film, Art, and Memory (FRENCH 358, HISTORY 231C)

This course concerns how writers, artists, and other cultural producers understood and represented the traumas of the First World War and its aftermath. Rather than tracing a political or military history of the conflict, we¿ll focus on how the horrors of War (both in the trenches and on the home front) fostered broader social and cultural shifts, as people questioned the very foundations of European civilization. Most specifically, we'll explore the connections between the War and the emergence of post-War modernist movements, as writers and artists created new works to help them make sense of the catastrophe and the new world it wrought. Though France provides our starting point, we'll also travel beyond the Hexagon to incorporate other views and major works. Course readings will be in English, though students may elect to read works in French if they wish.

FRENCH 277:Literature and the Self in Twentieth-Century France

In this course, we will explore how the different discoveries concerning the self during the XXth Century (throughout philosophy, politics or psychoanalysis) do reflect in the domain of literature. Nouveau roman, autobiography, auto fiction or self references will be amongst the themes explored in class. Our main texts will be taken out of the official list issued by the French Department. Taught in French.